Before the Queen
by MrsTater
Summary: When Tyrion divulges one of Jorah's secrets to Daenerys, Jorah discovers that the queen keeps a few of her own. post-ADWD


**Before the Queen**

The Imp smirked up at Jorah as he waddled from the queen's tent, escorted on either side-rather unnecessarily-by two of her bloodriders, their _arakhs _drawn. That did not bode well, Jorah thought, as Rakharo and Strong Belwas gripped each of _his_ arms and, at Daenerys' summons, brought him into the tent.

She sat on a camp stood as regally as if upon a throne, her dragons all around her, watching Jorah with their reptilian eyes. But Daenerys' eyes were the coldest, even as they fixed upon the demon's face branded across his cheeks. When he had stood before her the first time in the company of the Imp and her generals after the battle that reunited them, Jorah had curled his hands into fists so tight that his fingernails had nearly broken the skin in his attempt to school the rising flush into submission when the woman he loved looked upon the shameful mark with unmasked horror and pity.

Now, Jorah wondered whether horror and even pity weren't preferable to the stoicism with which she regarded him.

He'd thought many times before when contemplating the beauty of his queen how her peculiarly colored eyes were precisely the shade of violet in the northern skies just before the sun dipped below the jagged outlines of the trees. At his moment, however, they were storm clouds, dark and unyielding, heralding a long winter.

Jorah had prepared himself to be burnt by his queen; he had never expected that in her presence he might feel a cold that seeped so deep into his bones that even he, a northman, might not be able to endure it.

When she had sent her guards away, leaving them alone together, she rose, draping the trailing hem of her _tokar _over one arm.

"I have had much of your story from the Imp," she said. "Do I need to have Ser Barristan remove a lying tongue? Or does the creature speak truth?"

Jorah regretted many things, but currently at the top of the list was that _he _had not silenced the Imp when he'd had the chance; how sick he'd grown of that incessantly wagging tongue throughout their travails together. Though of late he'd begun to think that in Tyrion he'd found an unlikely ally: a creature even more wretched than himself who sympathized with Jorah's lovelorn plight, who might even vouch for him to Daenerys that it was the hope of her that had made Jorah keep fighting, keep breathing even though their captivity had made death look more appealing to him than ever it had. Instead, it seemed that the Imp, though uglier than any of his kin, was a Lannister through and through, and had only saved Jorah's life so that he might receive justice from the very queen who had banished him to fall in with such company in the first place.

"Jorah."

He dragged his gaze up from his feet to meet Daenerys'. "He told you true that my treatment of him was…not gentle."

His answer obviously displeased the queen, but Jorah was relieved to see her eyes flash. He didn't miss the irony that a man of the north did not know how to cope with the cold, but where Daenerys was concerned, he preferred heat.

Fire meant that she cared. That he mattered to her.

"Coyness does not become you, ser," she said. "Did the Imp, or did he not, meet you in a brothel, lying with a whore who looked like me?"

Tyrion's voice rang so clearly in his head that Jorah wondered if the Imp hadn't waddled back into the tent. _It wasn't _lying_ with a whore so much as sitting with his cock up her-_

"I ought to have killed him," Jorah spat. "Or sent him back to Cersei for the lands and lordship-"

"But then who would have saved you from being sold to the fighting pits of Meereen?" Daenerys asked him over her shoulder as she turned to go back to her seat. She paused in front of the stool to stroke Drogon's glittering black scales and murmur words to him that made the smoke stop curling from his nostrils. "You owe the Imp your life. However little it's worth." She flicked her eyes to him, and they narrowed to slits like the dragons' as they watched him. "Say it outright, Jorah."

His face reddened. "It's the gods' own truth, Your Grace. When you banished me, I sought comfort in the arms of a whore."

But he had not found it.

Daenerys' loose-flowing silver mane, the sheen and softness of which could never be replicated in any other woman, fell in her face, hiding her reaction from him, as she resumed her seat upon her stool. Her voice, however, dripped venom as she said, "_In all the world,_ _I'll never find a man as true to me as you._That's rather a bleak prediction for my future, isn't it?"

"You claim not to love me," Jorah flung back at her, furious that she would fling his profession of love and loyalty back in his scarred face. "Why should it matter to you what my whores look like?"

Before he could blink, she had leapt to her feet again and cracked her small hand hard across his cheek. "You dishonor me, ser!"

Bizarrely, Jorah felt the corners of his mouth tug upward in a smile as the reason for this interrogation became to plain to him. Daenerys had told him once that she did not desire him. Why, then, should she burn with jealousy? He decided to fan the flame.

"You are not the only fair-haired lady I have loved. Perhaps I dishonor Lynesse Hightower."

"I took Daario Naharis for my lover!"

_That_ stung worse than the physical blow she had dealt him, but even that admission, which did not come as that great of a surprise, did not take his breath away quite like what followed:

"And I conceived a child by him."

Though she clearly intended the words to be the ultimate betrayal, Jorah could not feel it as such, because no sooner had the hot words flown from her mouth than tears welled in her eyes, extinguishing the fire, and she was no longer the Queen of Dragons, or Mother, as the freed slaves named her, but the beautiful sad-eyed girl he'd met years before on the eve of her wedding to a lord she feared.

"I didn't even know it, till I bled the babe into the Dothraki Sea. I've spoken of it to no one."

She had found another lover, another husband, but no one had taken his place as her trusted confidant. Couple that with her apparent mislike of not being first in his heart, and that was something. A great deal of something. Jorah went to his knees before her, and took her hands, which were curled into claws on her lap. "Daenerys, I-"

She peered at him from between the silver curtains of her hair. "I can never bear you children, Jorah."

His grip tightened around her hands as hope beat within his breast as if on the dragon's wings that had risen with her from the ash. "It's _you _I want, Daenerys, not your children-"

"You should. You will. If I make you Lord of Bear Island again, you will want-"

"Heirs I can make of my cousins, or my cousins' children-"

He felt her flesh turn cold as ice in his grasp before she pushed his hands away, and her gaze became once more the impenetrable frozen sky. "Or the bastards you get on your silver-haired whores?"


End file.
